Politico Pros

The Hill is full of people who can get themselves amped up over pretty esoteric stuff. But even by the high, arcane-obsessive standards of the Capitol, Stephen Gardner is something special.

Here is a man who has melded his wonky policy obsession with railroads to electronic music, created a successful band based on it, and then named that band Chessie in honor of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway that once ran though these parts.

“I’m a synthesizer,” Gardner said in demure self-summary.

And perhaps that’s the best word to describe Gardner — a Democratic staffer for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation — and the music he makes, music that has toured the world and punctuated the soundtrack of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Murderball.”

“I like having disparate things in front of me, and I like building connections between them,” Gardner said.

At the seat of these myriad interests is the great American railroad — or, as it’s been in recent decades, the American railroad struggling to renew its greatness.

Don’t describe it to Gardner that way. He’ll argue that it’s still a great system when comes to carrying freight. He’ll tell you that most Americans, and therefore most members of Congress, haven’t really gotten the railroad. He’ll cite the evidence for his case.

Indeed, here we find a man who has dreamed — yes, truly dreamed — of writing railroad policy since he was young.

“It’s almost like a Michael J. Fox kind of thing,” said National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman, who was Gardner’s predecessor at the committee. “How many people do you know who dream of writing Amtrak legislation?”

Gardner’s father was the county manager for Arlington County, Va. When the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac line was purchased by CSX Corp., Gardner’s dad would take his young son along to weekend survey meetings, where he would chat up the railroaders and learn about trains.

While at H-B Woodlawn high school, Gardner became enmeshed in the D.C. punk scene. He played bass for a band called Lorelei, which started releasing records and touring Europe by the time he was 15 and which gained a bit of a cult following.

After graduating from high school, Gardner deferred admission to Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., for one year to make music and participate in a management training internship program by Amtrak. He also taught a course at his old high school on the progressive education movement “because I was interested in pedagogy.”

In college, he merged these interests. Having already tasted some commercial recording success, he decided to buckle down on “the element of music I was least conversant in, and that was the natural phenomenon of sound.”

He constructed a course load of acoustics, political science, physics and transportation.

For his thesis, he would write of his collegiate experiences working at a small trolley and railway museum in western Massachusetts whose survival was “based on the novelty of their preservation of this past.”

It captured the way many of us have come to think of trains: as a relic of some bygone era.

“I think that exists to some extent,” said Gardner, “but I think it is totally misplaced. I think railroads are an absolute mode of the future.

“The unique role that they play in the past is a role they still play today and I think will play in a greater extent in the future,” he said. “What they did was localize development in arteries and sort of conquer great distance in a way that was efficient beyond any other comparable mode, and those efficiencies still exist today.”

During his college summers, Gardner did track maintenance for a small Virginia line. And he began Chessie.

Gardner said the music was meant to “explore railroads ... sonically, spatially and emotionally. The railway environment is really this interesting aesthetic world. And there is this long history of the music and aesthetic world being co-linked.”

After graduation, Gardner headed to Maine to work as a conductor, then to Boston to work as a dispatcher, then to Germany to spawn a little in the Berlin electronic music scene. He took trains all over Europe and returned home to Washington with rail betterment on his mind.

“We just sort of gave up on central planning in the 1960s, really, and said the market would just take care of our transportation problems in general, and we are suffering at the hands of that decision,” he said.

Milling about the Hill during Congress’ Christmas recess that year, Gardner popped into the Democratic offices of the House railroad subcommittee and introduced himself to the staff director. He was offered an internship that spring.

Gardner quickly came to find that train knowledge and “progressive thought” about the railways were both in short supply on the Hill.

“He’s one of the few folks of us up here on the Hill who has real-world experience, with a hard hat out on the tracks,” said a House Democratic staffer. “He first came to understand railroading from the operations point of view, whereas the rest of us come from a political or policy or legal point of view.”

Gardner’s arrival at the Capitol coincided with a particularly glum period for Amtrak, which was on the verge of bankruptcy and presumed to be on the way to shutting down.

The last Amtrak reauthorization bill was passed in 1997 and expired five years later. The ensuing years were filled with successive frustrations for the committee staff — bills that never made it out of conference or never made it to the floor.

In 2005, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and then-Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who was the subcommittee chairman, resoundingly passed a bill in the Senate, thanks largely to the wherewithal of Gardner, who had taken the reins as minority staff director at the time.

The reauthorization funds were tacked on to a budget bill that went to conference but was ultimately dropped. By 2006, the train had rolled all the way back down the Hill.

But with Democrats taking the Senate majority that year, and economic woes necessitating future rail options, the tides turned for Amtrak with the 110th Congress. Legislation has passed in both the House and the Senate this year. And though it hit a snag in late July, there’s high confidence that it will be signed into law by early next year.

Nobody could be more pleased than the Capitol Hill’s trainspotting savant.

“He’s one of the few folks of us up here on the Hill who has real-world experience, with a hard hat out on the tracks,” says one Hill staffer.

Stephen Gardner says:

“”I always think there are three types of staffer. There are the home-state lovers — they just love their home state or their district, and they just come here because they love it so much that they want to come here and help all the people they see. Then there are the people who are like the politico types because they love politics, and they want to be part of this sort of pageant and excitement and debate of politics. And then there are the policy nerds, which I think I am.”